


still breathing

by franticallywhisperedstories



Category: Ghostbusters (2016), Ghostbusters - All Media Types
Genre: 5+1 Things, Additional Tags to Be Added, Backstory, Child Abuse, Drinking, Ending Happier Than Rest of Story Combined, F/F, Gun Violence, Underage Drinking, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 21:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10772850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/franticallywhisperedstories/pseuds/franticallywhisperedstories
Summary: Six times Jillian Holtzmann drank tribute to someone, and the one time she wasn't alone.(Or, the growth of a mad scientist, inside-out, backwards, and curling into itself.)





	still breathing

**Author's Note:**

> Theoretically, I will be posting a chapter in the first week of each month. I already have about three written.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: death, description of a body, child neglect and abuse.

She drank for the first time when she was nine, a self-assured knock of her father’s Jack Porter. She left her smudged fingerprints all across the flimsy glass, and she let them linger. Tangible proof of her rebellions, her failures. It was like a toast- _here’s to the McEllery kid, God help him. Here’s to making it to the double digits, someday._

Somber silence, and then drink, still fingers betraying the shake of her words. If she pretended, she could hear the muffled clink of other glasses against hers, and a whispered echo of _God help him,_ like if enough people said it, God really would tuck his sweaty hair behind his ears and rub his cold, cold hands

A car scraped into the driveway. Jillian wiped her hands on her pants, pushed the bottle to the back of the cabinet, and ran. A headache was starting to press against her temples, and she called it a hangover. She called it tribute. She hadn’t known the kid.

Her dad crashed through the screen door, flimsy summer netting even well into October, and she didn’t look behind her.

* * *

 It was cold in her bedroom, and a piece of spring ticked up from the mattress, scraping her lower back. Her gory, childlike fascination with the dried blood on the kid’s upper lip was fading, leaving her feeling faintly sick. She rolled over and pressed her hands to the insides of her thighs, as if to warm them. As if to provide evidence that she was still tangible, that there were still blood vessels creeping against her skin.

She’d found him facedown and she’d had to nudge him with her toe to push him over, slumped into the road. She didn’t like that, didn’t like how easy it had been. She’d been embarrassed of the way she’d whispered, _Hello?_  the word sticking in her throat, tripping over her weight-laden tongue. It was a stupid thing to do; anyone and his dog could’ve figured that he was dead.

She pushed herself up and trailed out against the wall, static electricity puffing her hair into something bigger than it should’ve been, something proud. She tiptoed down the hall like a ghost, leaving dusty sockprints on the floor. Her dad was on the phone, talking loudly with just a hint of anger. He liked to pick arguments, and he liked to win them. She wouldn’t bother him, but she wanted to. She wanted to hop onto the table that looked like it would break whenever more than three plates were stacked on top and shout, _Hey, I saw a body today!_ Then he would look up.

He caught her eye, then looked down at the scratched surface of the table. She traced designs, blooming flowers and soft-serve ice cream, summery, twisting things. She’d found her bugs, hadn’t she, she’d found her damn bugs.

Her dad cut off the conversation with a sharp, “Goodbye,” and slammed the phone to the wall so hard it fell off again, turning slowly in midair, caught by its curling gray-smudged cord. He pressed his hands flat against the table and sighed. He liked sighing almost as much as he liked arguments.

“You stay out of trouble today?” he said pointedly, and she nodded. The kids at school teased her for how much she talked, how loud her voice got when she was excited. If only they could hear how quiet she was at home.

They’d been crawling up his skinny fingers, all in a line. Ants and roly-polies and the red ones, so tiny they looked like a period at the end of a sentence, bloody against his near-transparency. She’d thought vicious things about how they could squeeze under his closed eyelids or onto his tongue. His mouth had been open, a little pink O of surprise. She could picture them feasting on the plaque of his teeth, the gunky remains of Sunday breakfast.

“Good,” her dad grunted. He picked up the newspaper and opened it dramatically, like he was tearing the pages apart. She watched his eyes track the headlines. She watched his brow furrow.

She’d gone out with her three-dollar binoculars and her paperback field guide, looking for insects. The woods weren’t very woody anymore, property taped off and staked out, shiny skeletons of houses beginning to appear, creeping up slowly like English ivy on old buildings. Still, there was the creek if you knew where to find it, sprinkled with mossy logs, and there were places where you couldn’t see any hint of humanity, little pockets sheltered from the rest of the world, and that was where she always found herself.

She liked bugs. She liked watching them move. If she could scrape the fungi off the bark of the older trees, she would find little civilizations of swarming critters and she could speak to them, formally using their scientific names and telling them her secrets, of which there weren’t many.

“Damn shame about the McEllery kid,” her dad said, and her blood ran cold. She pictured him, facedown on the asphalt, passed by again and again, a thousand people too nervous to drag him to his clotted feet and give him a good Christian burial. She’d heard that people try to pass off responsibility onto other spectators, but nobody had come down that road all day, probably, and she’d still been glued to the asphalt by her sneakers, gaping at the poor kid who nobody could bring themselves to save.

“Who’s he?” she said. People didn’t ask her questions enough for her to get good at lying; her pulse thrummed wildly against the metallic taste of her gums.

Her dad shot her an annoyed look. He liked to read the paper in peace. “Thomas McEllery. Lives two doors down. Declared formally missing yesterday.”

“Oh,” she said. She imagined invisible hands kneading against her agitated stomach, pressing it down so it didn’t leap into her throat. She imagined fingers wiping clean the blood on her teeth from biting down on the inside of her cheek. She wanted to ask more questions- _does anyone know where he is, is his family okay, are they scared, is anyone going to find him?_

“Yes,” her dad said. “Oh.”

She frowned at the splintering wood floors, dark cracks shivering up each beam. She imagined Thomas McEllery’s mother going out and buying that gray Virginia Tech hoodie, those orange-and-white Keds. There were grass stains on the knees, much like the ones Jillian scrubbed out of her own pants every Saturday. He’d looked cold.

She got a yogurt from the door of the fridge and went back down the hall to her room. She curled into the corner, the only space that she could ever manage to fill. She tried to remember how the alcohol had tasted. It should’ve been some big, powerful thing, her first drink, but it wasn’t. She could barely recall it. It had been slightly woody and the taste had stuck in the back of her throat a little longer than she would have liked it to.

In general, alcohol was pretty gross.

She stretched out her legs until her toes just touched the opposite wall, tracing the cracks in the plaster until they wound up and out of reach. It had started to rain, a gloomy beating on their roof. It was loud here, like the apocalypse was rolling in. Like the first stretch of Noah’s famous flood. It made her want to gather all the squirrels and bugs and everything that never laughed at her and crowd them onto an inflatable raft. It made her want to bid cheerful goodbye to the sin-filled world and start anew.

* * *

 It had been dusty that morning, the kind of tranquil sunlit day she’d come to expect from early October. Her dad had been gone by the time she’d padded down to the kitchen. He’d promised to go grocery shopping the previous day, but he didn’t. He never did.

She’d walked along the creek for a while, singing old jazz songs quietly. She didn’t have a good voice or the memory for lyrics, but she liked jazz. She liked buzzing her lips and making siren noises, imitating a whole orchestra with her arms spread wide. She was pretty good at trumpets and most kinds of drums, and she was working on saxophones and oboes. Mostly she liked disrupting the peace, something her elderly neighbor said she was great at.

She’d found the rough, half-buried railroad ties, skinny wood deeply weathered by about fifty years of near-constant storms. Maybridge, Pennsylvania didn’t half-ass much. She’d followed them for a while, trying to imitate the whistles of the trains she swore she heard at night, when everyone else was asleep. No train had passed through town in two or three decades, but she heard them, the faint chugging of tireless wheels and someone hanging off the edge, shouting _All aboard, last stop for Somewhere Else!_ She imagined it like the Polar Express, hundreds of worn, dissatisfied kids shuttled off to glamorous, adult lives. She imagined that one day she would run outside in her bare feet, waving her arms and shouting _Take me with you!_

She’d stood on the edge and flagged down the trains whistling by for a solid ten minutes before moving on.

She hadn’t actually wanted to go to the road. There was nothing magical about cracked yellow lines that weaved dangerously, about chunks of tar and grime sinking into the soft ground, swallowed by the earth. But it was the most straightforward way home, so once the skies had started promising rain, she’d cradled her binoculars to her chest and aimed herself towards the graceful gray ribbon that made a fool of her little self-sustained town.

Nobody ever went down the road. Jillian didn’t even know what it was called. There were plenty of side streets and freeways cutting through Maybridge, but they were all frequented, with businesslike signs and neat little arrows. Nobody asked what you were talking about when you said _the road._

So there were no cars, no anxious hitchhikers, not even a sparrow to bear witness when she found Thomas McEllery, fourteen and gangly with more ambitions than he had time, even if he’d lived to be eighty.

She’d tripped over him, quite literally, and God, what an awful way to find a body. Her foot had connected with flesh and she’d pinwheeled across to the next lane over, shouting half-formed apologies because that’s what you did when you ran into someone, that’s just what you did. She’d straightened up and whipped around, almost shouted, _Hey, watch where you’re going!_ but she didn’t. She saw his cornfield-blond hair matted to the back of his head, his outstretched fingertips scraping against the asphalt, and the words died on her tongue.

She’d nudged him over onto his back. No boy should die on his stomach, like a dog keening for mercy. Like a fucking coward. She’d crouched and stared at him, and there was only empty space all around them, struggling to fill in the blanks between the grubby nine-year-old and the boy she’d found, the damn stupid kid who would shape her whole life.

There was black dust lining his eyes, a dirty film across his retinas. They were open, clear blue. He was the ultimate all-American boy, the yellow rose of Texas. She knew him only from stories, a good Catholic kid who had honor-roll grades and had almost made the baseball team three weeks ago. He was the kind of kid you expected good things of- not great, never great, but good. Normal.

His very existence, or lack thereof, perplexed Jillian. Kids like him didn’t die. Kids like him went to end-of-summer barbecues and told each other secrets on their porch swings.

She crouched in front of him. Her hair flopped into her eyes, leaving the nape of her neck exposed to the chill. That was when she whispered “Hello?” her voice weird and throaty, like she had a cold.

He didn’t respond. She didn’t know how to check a pulse but she did anyway, knowing what she would find. How could she not? She’d seen this boy run to catch the bus just two days ago, backpack nearly falling from one of his shoulders, very much alive. There was an odd combination of blood, snot, and dirt on his upper lip, long-dried into a bizarre mustache. A painful laugh scraped her throat. She shouldn’t have laughed, weird tiny Jillian with thoughts too big to ever articulate, spending her recesses drawing wide, swooping blueprints across the chalkboard.

She’d focused on his thumbnail because she couldn’t look at his face any longer, a neat half-moon of ivory. He didn’t bite his nails like she did; she felt oddly disconnected to him. She couldn’t look at the world through the eyes of someone who didn’t bite his nails. Maybe there was some change in his pockets, maybe he’d been jogging to the store to get some soda and candy. She was afraid to check.

She’d stood there for a long time, scared and excited and nauseated. Her stomach hurt. She could picture him sitting up like Frankenstein from his coffin of brown grass and cigarette butts. She could hear him laughing. In her imagination, his eyes didn’t change, glossy and dirty and dead, dead, dead.

She hadn’t looked at the bugs at the time, and that was the thing she could picture most vividly later, isn’t it funny how those things work out. She’d felt like she should leave him some offering, flowers or a card or something, like a little shrine you saw at the scene of some terrible tragedy, the only thing marking the blood that was invisible now, returned to the ground.

She’d torn her favorite page out of her field guide. It had a giant butterfly on it and text almost too small to read with her bad eyes. At first she thought maybe the butterfly was too girly for him, but it was orange and white like his Keds, so maybe it was appropriate. She didn’t want to touch him, so she tucked it under a broken chunk of the road.

She had turned and run, trying to blink his face out of her mind.

* * *

Her dad totally lost it a few days later when he finally pulled out his Jack Porter to find a fair swallow gone. He hunted her down, his eyes the kind of steely she’d learned to hide from. He proffered it in a shaking fist, amber liquid sloshing merrily.

“What did you do?” he spat.

“Nothing,” she said. She didn’t regret drinking it. It had been warm and not too bad a way to send off the teenager at the side of the road. He had probably drank his father’s whiskey, too. She wondered if it had burned the back of his mouth.

“Don’t you lie to me,” he said. “Nobody likes girls who lie.”

“I’m not lying,” she said.

“Of course you’re lying, who else would’ve drank it?”

She shrugged. She felt cornered, caged, but he was the animal. He was very close to her now, close enough to do the things he always promised to do. Close enough to kick her fucking ass to the curb and stomp on it, send her out to live with her whore of a mother.

“See,” he said triumphantly, “you did drink it.”

She couldn’t win arguments with her father, because he was the father, and he had control over her. No matter how logical her points were, it always came down to that.

If she were braver, she would shout, _So what! Yeah I drank it, yeah I fucking drank it. I did it for reasons you could never understand, because you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself!_

Instead, she shrugged again and said, “I don’t know.”

“How could you _not know-,”_ he started, but then the telephone shrieked from the kitchen. He glared at it and then stomped off. Four months later, when she would walk in on her dad and his (apparently new) girlfriend doing it in the guest room, the shouted phone conversations would make sense, but before that, they weren’t much other than a blessed relief.

He pointed a shaking, knobbed finger out the door, covered the receiver with the other hand, and told her to go get the newspaper. She didn’t have to be told twice, glad to get out of the house with its sweating walls and arthritic floorboards. Glad to get away from her dad.

She kicked a tiny shard of brick down the driveway until it bounced into the road and shattered. Part of her wanted to sneak down the hall late at night and drink all the rest. She wanted to get drunk, laughing-at-nothing graceless drunk.

She knew she wouldn’t, though. She was afraid of her dad, but she was more afraid of herself. Afraid she would like it. That she wouldn’t want to stop. Imagine the look on her nosy neighbor’s face when she came strolling into his AA meeting? _Hi, my name is Jillian and I saw a body but didn’t tell anyone._ Yeah.

The clouds were a layered gray like they so often were, thick and inpenetrable. They’d rolled in when she wasn’t looking. It was days like this that she missed the sun, weak and tired as it may be. Somewhere distant, thunder rumbled, and the lightning took a few delayed beats to catch up. She could see a faint veneer of rain if she squinted, shimmering blankets moving into arching formation. She would be kept up again by its relentless scream on the roof.

The newsboy could never be bothered to hit the square block of dirt they called their yard, but Jillian had yet to catch him at the act. She squatted her sore feet onto the asphalt and rustled the newspaper out of its yellow plastic. She shook the strained rubber band from its captivity and slipped it around her wrist. Her hair had started to grow out again and she hated it in her face.

The paper unfolded beneath her hands. The picture on the front was the same as it had been every day for a week- Thomas McEllery’s seventh-grade school photo, combed hair and mischievous smile, the kind that got boys’ hair ruffled and girls sent to reform school. What a shame, the photo said, that such a sweet boy isn’t here to better our world anymore. What a goddamn shame.

The headline, usually something about how there had been no progress thus far, caught her eye.

LISA MCELLERY BROUGHT INTO CUSTODY FOR QUESTIONING ABOUT DEATH OF SON, it stated.

Jillian looked up. The rain was closer now. She could hear it through the trees, maybe a block and a half away. She could hear it wash the sins from a dozen street corners.

Half-illuminated in the window, her father gesticulated angrily to the phone. She watched him reach up and take a swig of Jack Porter, eyes closed. She watched him stretch his lips back and smile.

She raised an invisible glass to the sky. “God help the McEllery kid,” she said grimly. The rain roared an agreement, _God-help-him-God-help-him-God-help-him._

It came in all around her, and she let herself get caught in the storm.


End file.
